A01=Elizabeth Dill
agency
Author_Elizabeth Dill
Category=DSB
companionate ideal
coverture law
David Hume
Declaration of Independence
deism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
extramarital
fiction
founding father
gender
George Washington
heroine virtue
homosociality
identity
incest novels
James Madison
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Leaves of Grass
male lovers
marriage contract
martyrdom
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Paul Revere
personal
philosopher
race
rape-as-ruin narratives
real
Revolutionary War
romance
self
sexuality
slave women
subjectivity
suicide
sympathy
Walt Whitman
Product details
- ISBN 9780813943398
- Weight: 420g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 30 Nov 2019
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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What is the role of sex in the age of democratic beginnings? Despite the sober republican ideals of the Enlightenment, the literature of America’s early years speaks of unruly, carnal longings. Elizabeth Dill argues that the era’s proliferation of texts about extramarital erotic intimacy manifests not an anxiety about the dangers of unfettered feeling, but an endorsement of it. Uncovering the more prurient aspects of nation-building, Erotic Citizens establishes the narrative of sexual ruin as a genre whose sustained rejection of marriage acted as a critique of that which traditionally defines a democracy: the social contract and the sovereign individual.
Through an examination of philosophical tracts, political cartoons, frontispiece Illustrations, portraiture, and the novel from the antebellum period, this study reconsiders how the terms of embodiment and selfhood function to define national belonging. From an enslaved woman’s story of survival in North Carolina to a philosophical treatise penned by an English earl, the readings employ the trope of sexual ruin to tell their tales. Such narratives advanced the political possibilities of the sympathetic body, looking beyond the marriage contract as the model for democratic citizenship. Against the cult of the individual that once seemed to define the era, Erotic Citizens argues that the most radical aspect of the Revolution was not the invention of a self-governing body, but the recognition of a self whose body is ungovernable.
Through an examination of philosophical tracts, political cartoons, frontispiece Illustrations, portraiture, and the novel from the antebellum period, this study reconsiders how the terms of embodiment and selfhood function to define national belonging. From an enslaved woman’s story of survival in North Carolina to a philosophical treatise penned by an English earl, the readings employ the trope of sexual ruin to tell their tales. Such narratives advanced the political possibilities of the sympathetic body, looking beyond the marriage contract as the model for democratic citizenship. Against the cult of the individual that once seemed to define the era, Erotic Citizens argues that the most radical aspect of the Revolution was not the invention of a self-governing body, but the recognition of a self whose body is ungovernable.
Elizabeth Dill is Associate Professor of English at City University of New York at Kingsborough.
